I recently asked these questions. What right had the 1916 insurgents to start killing innocent Irish people?
Why had none of the signatories of the Proclamation ever stood for parliament? How could they possibly call the butchers of Belgium "gallant allies"? How could supposedly civilised people today "celebrate" an orgy of violence in which hundreds of innocent Irish people died?
Naturally, I got no answers to all four questions. The nearest was from Barry Andrews TD, son of David Andrews, as to why none of the signatories had stood for parliament. In as much it is possible to make sense of his convoluted prose, his explanation apparently was that, following a corrupt Act of Union, the elected parliament would have been in London. How shocking: London, of all places.
Well, thanks to John Redmond the next parliament wouldn't have been in London at all, but Dublin. In 1916, Home Rule was law, and awaiting implementation. So why didn't the men of the Rising wait until the first Home Rule parliament?
But of course, this presumes the existence of an electorate which would have endorsed the numerous (and hopelessly contradictory) ideas of the signatories. Admittedly, James Connolly had already, if only briefly, dabbled in local politics, but had been rejected by the electors of the Wood Quay ward. It seems unlikely that a larger body of voters would have endorsed his peculiar Hiberno-Caledonian brand of godless Marxism.
Connolly's brief foray into democracy was the furthest to which the signatories of the Proclamation went. However, one non-signatory, Maj John MacBride, who had, according to the historian Roy Foster though he himself denied it, sexually violated his 11-year-old stepdaughter Iseult, stood unsuccessfully in a Mayo by-election. His ways were finally concluded by some British bullets. Do I regret this? Only in as much as a vile bully, a drunken braggart and an alleged violator of young girls (I doubt if Iseult was alone) was thereby turned into a national hero.
With a wearying predictability, Barry Andrews raised the familiar old cliché of the killing of Francis Sheehy Skeffington. "The murder of combatants on both sides was a consequence of a quest for national self-determination. Mr Myers refers to the death of Const James O'Brien. He fails to mention the murder in custody of the pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington on the orders of Colonel Bowen-Colthurst [ my italics in both cases]."
Firstly, James O'Brien was not a combatant, but an unarmed police officer. Revealingly, Barry Andrews referred to his killing as a "death", but the killing of Sheehy-Skeffington he - rightly - called "murder". Bowen-Colthurst - a captain, not a colonel, Barry - was a violent and dangerous officer who should have been executed (also for the murders of Thomas Dixon and Patrick MacIntyre); indeed, I wish he had been, if only to curtail the dirge of one-sided nationalist whinging about the Rising. If you accept that Bowen-Colthurst - whose counsel at his court martial was, like Barry, a lawyer called Andrews - should have been shot, then you must accept that there was some moral logic to the execution of the signatories. Which is what I believe.
Now, a common complaint about last week's columns was that I didn't condemn the "extremity" of the executions. I didn't, because they weren't extreme. By the standards of the time, they were in fact very moderate. The Germans had executed thousands of civilians in Belgium and Northern France in August and September 1914 on the (almost entirely spurious) grounds that they were insurgents, "our gallant allies" apparently having an entire army of Bowen-Colthursts. Moreover, in 1916 alone the British executed 95 of their own soldiers.
With hundreds of civilians, policemen and soldiers dead in the streets of Dublin, could the military command have allowed the leaders of the Rising to go unshot? And remind me: how did the Free State government deal with the problem of insurgents during the Civil War? Ah yes, by judicially executing nearly 80 prisoners, never mind the roadside killings of captives we know nothing of.
Barry Andrews repeats the worthy old canard that the 1918 election provided "a retrospective legitimacy to the campaign for nationhood sparked in Easter week". Untrue. Only 47 per cent of the votes went to Sinn Féin - but even that figure was boosted massively by widespread Shinner personation. And who - among many others - was busy personating votes? Why, by his own admission, none other than the fourth Andrews to appear in this column: Todd, Barry's grandfather.
Barry's party colleague Senator Geraldine Feeney also publicly replied to my recent observations about the catastrophic economic consequences of the Rising. Ireland of 1914, I said, was one of the richest countries in an astonishingly poor world. By 1970, Ireland "was just about the poorest country in Europe". Quoting from my column, the good senator deleted the "just about" and alleged I'd said what I hadn't: that by 1970, Ireland "was the poorest country in Europe." She exulted: "Mr Myers seems to have forgotten that Albania, Romania, Portugal and Spain were considerably poorer than Ireland in 1970."
I'm sorry: was that meant to be the pile-driver that won the argument? Gee whiz. OK. So those four exceptions - two countries bankrupted by communism, two by fascism - I grant you. By 1970, we were the poorest free country in Europe. Thank you, senator: with your fair hand, my economic case proven; and by the hokey, I bet your party whip goes ashen-faced whenever you get up to speak.